This Side of Salvation

CHAPTER 34

THREE HOURS BEFORE THE RUSH

I slipped through the woods between my backyard and Kane’s, then made my way a few doors down to Stephen Rice’s house. From the music and laughter, it was obvious which yard held MMHS’s hottest after-prom party.

I entered through the gate behind the pool house. When I came around the small blue building, my senses were swamped by the spectacle.

The Rices’ backyard was like an oasis without a desert. The crowded kidney-shaped pool and humongous hot tub were surrounded by sandstone and slate rather than ordinary concrete. On the pool’s near edge, a waterslide curved around a waterfall lit from beneath by blue and green lights. Karaoke was going on under the gazebo, outlined with white lights, and the wide, level lawn nearby was packed with partygoers lying on beach towels. Some of them were doing a lot more than lying.

“Coop!” Kane was hoisting himself out of the pool. He walked briskly over to me, his feet sending splashes of water out before him. “You escaped—that’s awesome. Come meet Jon. Um, I mean, Jonathan.”

A guy with reddish-blond hair swam to the edge of the pool. I squatted down to shake his head and exchange a “Hey.”

Suddenly someone grabbed my shoulders, and for a moment I teetered, about to plunge into the water fully clothed.

“David Cooper! David Cooper!” Stephen Rice repeated my name as he yanked me to my feet. “I cannot tell you how glad I am you’re here, bro.” He looped his arm around me, speaking vodka fumes into my face. “Check you out in your old stealth swag. I remember those times back in middle school, right? How many miles did we log running from the cops? Sucks you had to go to home school. Tell you what: You can borrow a pair of my swim trunks. I’ve got, like, forty million.” He gave me a light push toward the pool house. “Bathroom closet.”

“Thanks” was the first word I got in edgewise. I approached the front of the pool house. Through the French doors I could see people gathered in the main room near a fireplace.

One of those people was Bailey.

My hand froze on the door handle, unable to turn it.

“Push it, genius,” said some guy walking behind me.

“I know.” I shove the door open, almost smacking someone in the face.

Bailey, of course. Barefoot. In a pink-and-blue bikini with a bright yellow towel around her waist. The same colors she was wearing the day we first met.

“Hi.” With some effort. I let go of the handle. “As you can see, I’m . . .” I couldn’t think of an adjective.

“Here?”

“Yeah. Here.” I wondered if she could tell that my chest was caving in from seeing her. Or at least it felt that way, with my heart racing and swelling at the same time, overcome with the adrenaline of fear and joy.

“Sorry, can I?” A short, brunette girl was waiting to get in. Bailey drew me into the corner, out of the way of the door. The girl went past us into the bathroom.

“So you know Stephen?” I managed to ask Bailey.

“From Sierra Club.”

“Oh.” Give the Rices’ gigantic McMansion, I would not in a million years have pegged them as environmentalists, but okay. People can surprise. “Are you guys . . . you know.”

She shook her head, but in confusion, not denial. Then her eyes widened. “No! I’m not with him. I’m not with anyone. I just came because it sounded fun.”

“Oh. Yeah. It seems fun so far.”

We kept nodding and nodding and nodding. Across the room, a small group by the fireplace burst into laughter. It sounded like they were playing a board-game version of Truth or Dare.

“What’s in the bag?” Bailey asked.

“Oh!” I could not stop saying “Oh.” I tossed away the bag, then opened the plastic box with the corsage. “I ordered them for prom. So they would’ve been for you if we hadn’t—I mean, if you were still my—if we were still—just take them, okay?”

She examined the corsage through the clear lid, her eyes turning sad. “I also came to the party because I thought you’d be here.”

“Oh. I am. Here.” And incapable of complex sentences.

She put out her hand like she was going to touch my arm, but ended up just gesturing to my black clothes. “I assume you snuck out.”

“Actually, Saturday night is ninja night at my house. Family tradition.”

Bailey laughed at last, then bit her lip and lifted her gaze to mine. “Black’s a good color for you.”

“You mean it’s attractive or appropriate?”

“Maybe both.”

“That’s a shame.” I bent my arm against the wall over her head, leaning in. “Because I have to take these clothes off now.”

Bailey glanced at a closed door on the opposite side of the room, then frowned. My stomach sank. She used to like the way I flirted.

The bathroom door next to us slid open, and the girl came out. I stepped around Bailey. “Be right back.”

“I’ll be right here.”

Inside the bathroom, I found a pair of swim trunks my size in the closet, tossed off my clothes, yanked the trunks on, and slid the pocket door open, all in about ninety seconds.

I decided I was done being awkward. I led Bailey outside by the pool, where the loud music and laughter would cover our voices enough for privacy. “Kane said you were asking for me. Why?”

“I was hoping you were all right.” She looked at her yellow flipflops, tapping the heel of one against the toe of the other. “And I wanted to say I was sorry for what I said when we broke up. I was hurt and scared.”

“Scared of what?”

Bailey fidgeted with the knot in her towel. “It’s one thing to compete with another girl. But I can’t compete with God.”Yes, you can, I thought. That’s the problem.

Her whole face softened, and I realized I’d said that out loud.

Bailey and I headed straight for the waterslide. We went down on our butts, our stomachs, our backs; alone, and then finally together, crashing into the sides, plunging deep into the pool, coming apart as we slipped beneath the water, finally finding each other on the way to the surface.

Then Bailey floated back through the waterfall into the tiny cavern created by the slide’s rocky overhang. Her silhouette glowed and blurred in the blue-lit cascade. I joined her in the cavern, where the wall of falling water made us seem alone, and kissed her. Bailey’s lips were cold but her tongue was warm, enough to heat my entire body.It didn’t feel like the last night of my life. It felt like the first.

We sat side by side in the crowded hot tub, my arm around Bailey’s shoulders, our bodies pressed together I wanted to hear every detail about the last forty days of her life, but first I had to ask the biggest question, as much as I dreaded the answer.“Did you decide where you’re going to college?”

Bailey’s lips curved into a smug smile. “Yep. I’ll give you a hint: their mascot is the same as Middle Merion High’s.”

“The Tigers?” I couldn’t think of which college she meant. Surely she wasn’t going to Auburn or LSU. The important thing was: “No Stanford Tree?”

She laughed. “No. Another hint. It’s full of gargoyles.”

It dawned on me then. “Whoa, you got into Princeton?” “Yes!”

We hugged, then double high-fived, then hugged again. Then she was off, chattering a mile a minute about the campus and the curriculum and how she might decide to be a math major instead of going into molecular biology but had plenty of time to decide, et cetera et cetera, and in the back of my mind all I could think was, Jersey’s only one state away. I can take the R5 to 30th Street Station, then the R7 to Trenton, then New Jersey Transit to Princeton Junction, and then that little train that goes to campus—the Dinky, I think?—and she’d be waiting for me at the station. This could totally work.

Some other seniors in the hot tub joined in on the college talk. I tried to stay in the moment and listen to the lively conversation, but my mind’s eye kept pulling back to marvel at where I was, who I was with, and what I was doing. It seemed so normal yet so surreal. Definitely not the night my parents had planned for me.

Mara was also at the party with Sam, disobeying Dad’s order to come straight home after prom. I caught glimpses of Rajiv and Patrick, the other two members of my old graffiti gang. Nate and Brandon had stopped me near the waterslide to say how much the team missed me.

Somewhere, hovering around the perimeter, were Mr. and Mrs. Rice. Their presence didn’t reduce the amount of drinking so much as drove it underground.

Stephen climbed into the hot tub holding a six-pack of Coke. His girlfriend, Alexis, joined him, her eyes bugging out at the high temperature.

“I will never get used to this.” She gasped as she sank into the water to sit beside Stephen.

“Yeah, you will,” he said. “Pass that shit around, okay? But for God’s sake, be subtle. Don’t let my parents see.”

“Check it out, peeps!” Alexis opened her fists to reveal black-labeled mini-bottles, then did a goofy little shoulder shimmy before handing them out. The opposite of subtle.

Meanwhile, Stephen distributed sodas. “Mixers, mixers, one per couple.” Bailey and I took a soda but turned down the liquor.

“What, you don’t drink?” Stephen shifted over to sit next to me. “I thought all jocks drank.”

“Not during the season.” This was technically true. It was also true that I didn’t drink during the off-season.

“But you quit the team. So right now, you’re not a baseball player.” He poked my shoulder with a tiny bottle, looking comically sincere. “You’re just a guy about to have the best night of his life.”

Bailey wore a neutral expression as she popped the top of the Coke can. I took the bottle from Stephen. It was Jack Daniel’s, which sounded rough and intimidating, but its container was barely the length of my middle finger. When I was younger, my dad would go through a whole handful of these bottles in a single evening. It seemed to make him happy (except when it didn’t).

If leaving the house three hours before the Rush was the “cake” of my rebellion, this drink would be the icing.

I twisted the lid, snapping the bottle’s seal, then reached for the can of Coke. Bailey drew it back away.

“No way!” she said.

“Come on, Bailey,” Stephen groaned. “Your parents are total potheads. I’m friends with their dealer.”

“I don’t touch the stuff!” she snapped at him. I don’t touch anything.”

Stephen elbowed me. “You hear that? She doesn’t touch anything. Gotta be a disappointment.”

“Go away,” I told him.

“Suit yourself.” He drifted across the hot tub, into his girlfriend’s arms.

“Stephen’s such an idiot,” Bailey said to me under her breath. “How did he ever manage to skip a grade? Plus, he got into Harvard.”

I held up the bottle to change the subject. “A little of this won’t hurt, right?”

Her face softened. “I just don’t want you to do anything you might regret in the morning.”

She tangled her leg around mine. Her skin was slick, like that of a dolphin I once touched at Sea World.

Even as I realized she was talking about sex—imminent sex, no less—my mind tripped into a weird space, thanks to my parents’ books and lectures:

What would happen to the SeaWorld dolphins if the Rapture came one day? Would they all escape to the ocean? But if the oceans turned to blood, the marine mammals might be better off at SeaWorld, especially for the short term.

“David, what are you staring at?”

Bailey’s voice seemed to come from underwater.

I blinked, then raised my gaze from the opening where the water flowed between the hot tub and the pool. I’d been picturing that water red with blood as well. I looked around. Kane was in the pool, arms crossed on the edge, talking with Jonathan-not-John. Mara was sitting in the gazebo, still in her prom dress, her bare feet propped up on Sam’s leg. Everything was so perfect. Too perfect.

“What if there was no morning, ever again?” I asked Bailey. “There will be.” She stroked my cheek with the back of her fingers. “I promise.”

“You can’t make promises for anyone but yourself.” I tipped the bottle into my mouth and drank.

It seemed like such a dramatic finish to my statement—until I started choking.

My throat seized up and my chest felt stabbed by a hundred blunt micro-knives. I couldn’t see through the sudden tears. All I could hear was laughter, mixed with Bailey’s murmurs of concern.

She clapped me on the back. “Someone get him some water!”

“He’s sitting in water,” Stephen said.

“Ooh, you’re so funny,” she replied sarcastically.

God, please don’t let me puke in this hot tub. I will never drink again if you don’t let me puke in this hot tub. I swear! Amen.

Bailey pushed a plastic bottle into my hand. “Here, drink some water.”

I sipped, then forced myself to swallow. Slowly my throat stopped spasming and I was able to open my eyes.

“This is why we have mixers,” Stephen held up his can of Coke. “But nice try on being hard-core.”

His girlfriend laughed, high-pitched and drunk.

Though I’d had only one gulp, my head was spinning, from the heat of the water and my near-asphyxiation. Bailey and I left the hot tub and headed for the lawn.

The night air felt like it had dropped twenty degrees, so we huddled close on our overlapping towels and watched Mara do karaoke with one of her old Middle Merion High friends. She sounded like an angel.

Kane joined us, spreading out his towel beside me. “What do you think of this place? The Rices had the pool redone to look like a desert oasis.”

“It’s amazing.”

“Yeah, amazingly tacky. There should be a law that you have to live in the Southwest to decorate like it. Inside the house they’ve got a gazillion Kachina dolls and turquoise ornaments, not to mention no-flush toilets.”

“I think it’s cool the Rices are trying to save water,” Bailey said.

“This is Pennsylvania. We have rain.” He smiled up at Jonathan-not-John as he joined us, handing Kane a Sprite.

Clearly my best friend hadn’t lost his animosity toward Stephen. After the hot-tub episode, I could understand why.

“I still think it’s amazing.” I watched Bailey twist her hair into a thick, wet rope over her left shoulder and wished I could capture everything about this night. “Kane, do you remember stomping moments?”

“Wow, I haven’t thought about those in years.”

“What’s a stomping moment?” Bailey asked.

“Something we did when we were kids,” Kane explained. “A stomping moment is like a mental snapshot of a time and place you want to remember forever.”

“You do this.” I bent my knee and raised my foot a few inches. “That’s like holding a camera’s shutter open. So the more important the moment, the longer you should pause, and the longer you’ll remember it.”

Bailey and Jonathan-not-John imitated me. “Now what?” he asked.

Kane swept his arm over the yard. “You just take it all in, and when you’re sure you’ll never forget, you stomp.” He lifted his own foot. “Whenever you’re ready.”

I closed my eyes to gather the first layer of memory, made only of sound. Mara singing, the splash of the water, the shouts of my new and old friends, the breeze in the tall trees behind the Rices’ yard.

When it was all there in my mind, I opened my eyes to see Bailey already gazing at me. I was what she wanted to remember.

I leaned forward and kissed her, eyes wide open. We stomped our feet at the same time, then laughed at our accidental synchronicity.

Bailey looked behind me, at the pool house, then brought her gaze back to mine. “Are you sober?”

My eyes felt clear and sharp, taking in the fullness of her bikini top. The question was loaded, and so was my answer.

“Yes, I am.”